Chapter 7: Understanding Responses to Personality Selection Measures: A Conditional Model of the Applicant Reasoning Process

The persistent discourse on the fakability of personality selection methods has somewhat masked two points that we believe are critical for a new, and more successful, future for these controversial predictors of job performance. First, even when severely criticized by many influential researchers in the field (Campion, Dipboye, Hollenbeck, Murphy, & Schmitt, 2004), selection practitioners and their academic research partners are loathe to abandon them. Second, it is the inconsistent, and often disappointing, predictive validities of these measures that is at issue—not whether faking matters. From the perspective of these two points, we would like to add our voices to the rumbling growl in the research field that process models are long overdue. Specifically, we contend that an applicant response model which attempts to explicate the situational influences on applicant responses, in contrast to a faking model, would help integrate the empirical literature and provide a theoretical structure for future investigations.